2004/12/09 21:04:00
VoIP(Voice over IP) is the future!
I have been playing with “skype”:http://www.skype.com a bit but the sound setup on Linux sucks a lot. I can’t get it to play nicely with my soundcard without hogging the whole thing. I will wait till they get with the program and port it to the newer and current linux ALSA sound system.
So I have moved on and decided to go a bit more industy standard. I now have a SIP( Session Initiation Protocol) phone setup at home. I have user “asterisk”:http://www.asterisk.org/ to setup a basic PBX(Private Branch Exchange) at home.
What does the above mean!! Well I now am able to accept Voice calls over the internet and if I am at my desk they will ring there but if I am not then you can leave a message and it will be emailed to me. It’s all pretty simple at the moment but as I start to grokk the configs a bit more it should make more sense.
Some more details.
I have tried
“linphone”:http://www.linphone.org/?lang=us&rubrique=1,
“kphone”:http://www.wirlab.net/kphone/ but have settled
on “minisip”:http://www.minisip.org/. It’s nice
and simple and works well with my sound card! The only problem I
think is that it does not jump to the front where there is a
incoming call. In the end I hope to use
“gnomemeeting”:http://www.gnomemeeting.org/ but for now
that does not use SIP and I have not got to the bit about setting
up H.323 connections to asterisk!
I also got a uk telephone number from “calluk”:http://www.calluk.com/ so you can dial direct from the POTS(Plain Old Telephone System). I use “pulver”:http://pulver.com for thier FWD(Free World Dialup) service so that I can have a nice external number. I would recommed that they are a good place for starting from as they have free client software and it’s all a “nice place to start with VoIP”:http://www.freeworlddialup.com/.
Asterisk is a really amazing bit of open source software that allows you to do all the things that you would expect for a local PBX and much more. Call routing, least cost routing, voicemail, those awfull “press 1 for …” services and much more. Quite complex but I am begining to understand it and once you have the concepts it should be simple to get it to do what you want.
New Contact details
sip:[email protected]
Phone: 08703404244
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